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Charles March marks his return to photography with this exhibition at the Bermondsey Project Space. The theme of the exhibition, which is called ‘Nature Translated’, is about “the way that art transmutes nature and nature transmutes art”, says Edward Lucie-Smith, well known art critic, writer and poet who is curating the show. The gallery, a former warehouse in Bermondsey, is managed by Crisis, the national charity for single homeless people. “Crisis does invaluable work giving vulnerable and overlooked members of society the opportunity to nurture creative talents. It draws attention to the immeasurable effect that the arts can have on our lives”, says Julia Peyton – Jones, curator of the Serpentine Gallery.
Charles March first started taking photographs seriously at the age of twelve. In his late teens, he had an apprenticeship with Stanley Kubrick, working on the film Barry Lyndon. Following that, he spent a period as a documentary photographer in Africa. He then became, under the name Charles Settrington, a leading advertising photographer, exploring means of image making that took photographic technology to its limits. At the conclusion of this period, family responsibilities intervened and he took on the mantle of running the Goodwood Estate in West Sussex, which is famous for its sporting events. He now at last feels free to explore a medium he has always loved in a new way and with a greater degree of freedom than he was able to enjoy previously.
“This new series of large scale images in black and white and colour, employs his chosen medium with extreme boldness and originality. Some people will be reminded of traditional Chinese ink paintings. Others of the ‘colour beginnings’ made by the great English landscape painter J.M.W.Turner, which are both a pinnacle of British romanticism and yet are also forerunners of aspects of American Abstract Expressionism”, says Lucie- Smith.“Through this new work, Charles March expresses a profound feeling for nature. He also insists through these images, that it is the function of any artistic medium, even photography with its long established reputation for literalism, to translate and transform what the artist sees so that it becomes an unmistakable personal statement”.